OUR SETTING
“The most extraordinary place on Earth” — SIR David Attenborough
The Daintree and surrounding Wet Tropics are ranked by the International Union on the Conservation of Nature as the second most irreplaceable World Heritage Area on the planet, largely thanks to its incredible biodiversity and historical significance. It’s a living ark of the origins of our known natural world: from the first known songbirds and flowering plants, to remant plant species that exist nowhere else. The Daintree is the kind of place that wordlessly communicates its vast, slow ancientness in the trickle of streams, the rush of the wet season deluge shaping and reshaping the landscape.
“The terrestrial equivalent of the Great Barrier Reef’s coral bleaching event” — The Wet Tropics Management Authority
In May 2019, following the hottest summer ever recorded, the Daintree’s managing body declared a climate emergency. Predicted slow decline from climate change has mutated into unprecedented rapid and catastrophic changes. The most recent climate modelling predicts that a third of all endemic species will be endangered or extinct by 2085 if trends continue -- but new evidence suggests that decline is occuring far more rapidly than predicted. In the last eighteen months alone, the Daintree and surrounding Wet Tropics area suffered through the most severe flooding event on record, a series of extreme heatwaves 10 degrees higher than the average, two cyclones, and bushfires in places that had never been burnt before.
Having been sheltered from the world’s larger climate changes for the past 180 million years, the Daintree’s Gondwanan remnant species do not have the ability to adapt to the impacts of anthropomorphic climate change and rising temperatures. We’ve been working with some of the most cutting-edge researchers in the field to build a lived experience of the vitality of the climate in the Daintree, and the real impacts of change. With nowhere else for this rainforest to survive, it’s up to us to stabilise our climate before we lose some of the most important living ecological heritage on our planet.
